


Sheets

by westwoodandridingcrops



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-02
Updated: 2015-07-02
Packaged: 2018-04-07 07:56:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4255491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/westwoodandridingcrops/pseuds/westwoodandridingcrops
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The bed comprehends our whole life, for we were born in it, we live in it, and we shall die in it." - Guy de Maupassant</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sheets

It was changing the sheets that was the worst, Sherlock realized. 

_______

Jim and he had stayed in. It was a cold, rainy November evening, and neither of them could be arsed to get up and  _do_  anything. So, logically, they’d stayed.

 It had started with Jim at one end of the sofa, Sherlock at the other, and had ended with Sherlock’s head nestled in Jim’s lap, Jim’s fingers threading absentmindedly through downy curls at the nape of Sherlock’s neck. Well… ended is a poor choice of words. How it really ended was with Jim Moriarty on top of him in Sherlock’s bed, grinding his hips as he fucked himself on Sherlock’s cock, his head back murmuring Sherlock’s name in a reverential tone Sherlock wasn’t sure he was ready to understand. 

Thirty-six hours later, the sheets had been ruined, sticky with come and lubricant, crumbed over with the leftovers of take out, and permeated with the smell of sex and stale cigarette smoke.

Sherlock had binned them, mourning the loss of their high thread count. 

_________ 

He was sick. He knew. John had bleated in his ear all day yesterday, nattering on about February wasn’t the right time for taking water samples from the Thames. Incorrect. It was the perfect time. 

But now, he cursed his pounding head, his aching back, his congested lungs, and his own foolishness for not, at least once, listening to his companion. 

“Come on, up,” a soft voice said from the door.

He looked over his shoulder and saw Jim in the doorway. When had he gotten here? He’d not heard him come in. Jim sat at the end of the bed and began pulling out over the counter medicines, juice containers,  _soup for God’s sake_. 

He said it was because Sherlock was ‘no use to him this way,’ but somewhere between Jim wiping his fevered brow for the twenty eighth time and the fourth spooned meal of chicken soup, he began to doubt him. 

By the time Jim was done helping him change the sheets, his days-long ignored muscles as weak as a kitten’s and protesting any movement, he was sure. Jim Moriarty cared.

_________

Sherlock hadn’t been sure when Jim moved in. He thought it must have happened gradually, but it seemed like one day, he’d had the place to himself, and the next he had expensive suits in his closet that weren’t his and a coffee maker where the tea kettle used to be. Jim’s habits were strange, but that suited him fine. He hardly had room to complain. 

Everywhere he looked he saw Jim, in the cracks of the floorboards where he was sure his skin cells and Jim’s were happily contributing to the dust, to the books in his book case, alternating between chemistry texts and his mother’s own  _Dynamics of Combustion_  signed by her in the inside cover to “brilliant Jimmy.” 

Perhaps the reason it’d been so easy is because it had been so effortless. Surely it should be more difficult to share space with a criminal mastermind. But, it wasn’t. Okay, so maybe sometimes Jim was particular. He had made Sherlock take down the headphones from that ‘poor beast’s head,’ and he had been quite insistent that John’s abandoned bedroom would be more than serviceable for their scientific pursuits. And, alright, he  _had_ in a fit of rage roasted the old Union Jack pillow on one of Sherlock’s Bunsen burners muttering about ‘tackiness.’ 

Sherlock pondered this all while leaning against the window frame of the sitting room. It’d been days since his last case, and he’d hardly bothered getting dressed after the last time he’d slept (two? three?) days ago.

Jim was reading the paper, when finally he’d slammed down his coffee and stood up, striding to Sherlock quickly. Sherlock felt his pulse leap in response. Was Jim about to proposition him? It wouldn’t be terribly surprising. He got close, so close Sherlock could smell the spice of his aftershave, his hands slipping over the fine linen of the sheet before suddenly it was ripped away from him. 

“You smell horrible. When is the last time you bathed?”

“What?” Sherlock asked incredulously. He could see it now, the slight downturn of Jim’s lip, the snarl at its corner. This was not what he’d expected. 

“Shower. Now, Holmes.”

Sherlock sulked as he slunk off to the bath, Jim now chattering to himself and hunting the blow torch. 

_________ 

The first hit was always strongest. It seemed to shine in his veins, singing through his blood and smoothing out the snarled tangles of his brain. The world was opalescent, a glittering thing it’d not been since he was a boy, still bright and full of promise. 

It was just so tedious otherwise. Jim had been gone, gone, gone for weeks on end now, flitting from this place to that. John was occupied with his toddler and his wife and his life away from Baker Street. Even his brother and Lestrade had been precious little help to stave off the boredom. 

So, instead he got high. 

High as a kite:  _Jim wouldn’t approve. Never use product was a cardinal rule._

 High and dry:  _Jim had left him to rot here while he patched his web, like a crawling spider tending its traps._

High and mighty:  _Jim in Westwood smiling like the cat whose caught the canary._  

Through hell and high water:  _Wasn’t that supposed to be the promise? So wherewashe, wherewashe, wherewashe?_  

But then, the inevitable happened. He was soaring, pulse racing, mind moving so quickly it’d gone quiet instead in protest, and then– flat. It flattened. No, no, surely there was more. It had gone too quickly. Had it been so fleeting when he was young? He couldn’t remember. And then, it went sideways. 

He could feel it just as it started, the tipping from flat to  _down_. He was crashing.

 He’d turned then to the heroin. He hit the water at a hundred miles an hour, but then it tugged him down slowly. He was drowning, but without the rush. It was a heavy, slow motion kind of dying, he supposed. Listless. Lethargic. It took its time with him. He could feel it pulsing, like his heart was pumping honey turned acrid and bitter sluggishly through his whole body. His brain, now forgiving him, tried and failed to fire, instead staying quiet. 

He missed him. Why the fuck didn’t he come home? This was his fault all his fault.

“I know,” the voice in his head answered, the Dublin drawl sounding tight and tired. 

He felt himself being rolled, first to one side and then the other, and sighed at the feeling of cool cotton against his damp flesh. It wasn’t until he felt the hand at his cheek that he realized someone was there, saving him from his death by inches.

_________ 

The morning sun was hot against his back; they’d forgotten to close the blinds. Jim grunted as Sherlock shifted away from the sunbeam shining directly onto his bare skin, and Jim reached to tug him close again. 

It was strange, even after all this time, being wanted this way even when they slept. Jim had come home late last night from a trip to Brussels. Sherlock had refrained from snapping back when Jim had been irritable, insisting instead that his criminal find his way to bed to sleep it off. He’d fidgeted in fits and starts before finally finding peace in the crook of Sherlock’s neck. 

“I don’t want to go to sleep,” Jim said in final protest. 

At some point during the night, their positions had changed and Sherlock had found himself a human sun visor. 

Jim sighed before waking, rustling in the covers and then sitting up on the edge of the bed. 

Sherlock still remembered. 

He’d stood. 

And then, fallen. 

And never gotten back up. 

In the days after, John had been the only thing that managed to keep Sherlock rooted to the world. John knew what it was like to lose a genius. Parts of it had been easy– packing up the books, the funeral Jim would have never wanted. But, parts had been so hard it had felt like they were ripping out chunks of Sherlock’s flesh to be packaged up, boxed and, ultimately, forgotten. 

It was John who’d finally convinced him to do it. Sherlock had avoided it. The Last Thing that smelled like Jim, like  _them_ together. 

It was changing the sheets that was the worst, Sherlock realized.


End file.
